Page 95 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

82 Nightmare Japan

with her own history of parental abandonment while defending both her
child and herself from the restless spirit of a young girl who, left
unattended by her parents, drowned in a water tank atop the block-style
tenement in which she lived. Indeed, the motif of drowning plays an
important role in both films, allowing viewers the opportunity not only to
experience two contemporary manifestations of the ‘avenging spirit’
theme, but also to engage with a metaphorical interrogation of the ‘return’
of a ‘repressed’ societal configuration that, like the spectral entities that
haunt these popular narratives, refuses to die quietly.

‘Dead Wet Girls’: Nakata Hideo’s Ringu and Dark Water

In a recent interview on US National Public Radio (NPR), noted Japanese
cinema scholar Grady Hendrix contributed to a discussion of Japanese
horror cinema’s international popularity by describing texts like Ringu
and Dark Water as tales about ‘dead wet girls’ (quoted in Ulaby, 2005)
seeking revenge for past injustices. Clearly intended as a humorous over-
simplification designed to enhance public interest in the recent wave of
popular kaidan or shinrei-mono eiga, as well as the inferior Hollywood
remakes they inevitably spawned, his reference to ‘dead wet girls’ is
illuminating. Hendrix’s recognition both of the theme of water and of the
angry ghost’s gender is crucial, especially when interrogating the social
resonances haunting some of the darkest corners of Nakata Hideo’s best
known works. Each based on a popular novel by the successful horror
writer Suzuki Koji, an artist that Publisher’s Weekly describes as ‘the
Stephen King of Japan’ (2004, para 1), Ringu and Dark Water stand out
as two of the best known contemporary Japanese horror films. As the
motion picture most frequently cited as the text responsible for initiating
global interest in Japanese and other East Asian horror cinemas, Ringu
has received copious critical attention, ranging from studies that read the
film as a thinly disguised postmodern fable about the cultural impact of
emerging communication technologies, to discussions of the film as a cult
text that has elicited an expansive fan base due, in large part, to Ringu’s